When it comes to telling a story, what can a video game do that is impractical or impossible in a poem, a play, a novel, a movie, or a TV series?
Nothing, I'm sure some people would say -- usually people with a startling ignorance of games. But I have a certain amount of sympathy for them. The unique strength of video game narrative is at the same time one that is fiendishly difficult to exploit fully. It would be possible to author a game that was on the artistic level of a major novel, but the amount of time and talent that it would require might well make it impractical. At the very least, the novelist would have much the easier time of it, even if we compare only the narratives and leave out the increasingly formidable technical knowledge and apparatus needed to create a modern video game.
So, what is this tantalizing strength in video game narrative? Look beneath the squashed sweetroll to find out....
When someone had died or was dying...they cut parallel lines into the cliff, exposing the white chalk beneath. With the right eyes, you could see them from the mainland or the fishing boats, and know to send aid, or impose a cordon of protection....My lines are just for this: to keep any would-be rescuers at bay. The infection is not simply of the flesh.
Let's begin with a very stripped-down example.
Dear Esther, by
The Chinese Room in Britain, is a rare example of a video "game" that is
nothing but narrative.
Dear Esther began as a "mod," a full-scale modification, to the game
Half-Life 2, with the script written by
Dan Pinchbeck, a professor at Portsmouth University whose academic specialty is video game narrative. It was then reworked on the technical and artistic side as a stand-alone game by
Robert Briscoe, one of the team responsible for another well-regarded and innovative game,
Mirror's Edge. Briscoe is by his own admission somewhat OCD, and the end product was a technical and artistic masterpiece (Briscoe came within a hair of starving himself in the process). The vast improvements to the graphics, combined with the beautiful score by
Jessica Curry for the original mod, resulted in something that gamers either love or hate. Let's just say that if you are the sort of player that lives to shoot everything that moves, you are best advised to avoid it.
As the sole person in the game, you land on a deserted but junk-strewn island in the Hebrides and make your way across the island as evening falls, trying to reach a metal tower with a blinking red light at its top. There are no enemies, you have no weapons or tools except for a flashlight that turns itself on and off, and you meet no other people. You are limited to a walk; you cannot run or jump. For a reason that is never very clearly explained, this island is special to you, and you seem to have been there many times before. As you travel across the island, you recall fragments of at least four separate narratives, centered on your wife, killed by a drunken driver in a car crash, the "Esther" of the title, who is somehow connected with the island; Donnelly, a historian of the Hebrides who is your source of information on their past; Jacobson, a Scandinavian who attempted to raise goats there at the beginning of the eighteenth century, only to die of disease; and a hermit, who is said to have come to the island on "a boat without a bottom."
Your path across the island is linear, but you can wander to a certain extent, and examine anything of interest: abandoned boats and washed-up cargo containers (are the Hebrides really such a garbage dump?), broken car parts and family pictures, with candles arranged around them like shrines; a wrecked lighthouse and abandoned buildings, where copies of an ultrasound on the tables suggest that Esther was pregnant when she died; and the graffiti you have drawn all over the island in luminous paint salvaged from a shipwreck, a mixture of chemical formulas, electrical diagrams, nerve systems, and fragmentary Biblical quotations. You take a bad fall while going through a series of caves; an injured leg becomes infected, and you realize your journey will be one-way. Finally, you reach the tower with its blinking red light, and then you die. I think. Your sanity has been eroding during the trip, partly due to the "handfuls" of drugs you take to numb the pain of your injured leg, and the ending may hint that all of it has occurred only in your imagination.
Dear Esther. I have burnt my belongings, the books, this death certificate. Mine will be written all across this island....We have always been drawn here: one day the gulls will return, and nest in our bones and our history. I will look to the left and see Esther Donnolly, flying beside me. I will look to the right and see Paul Jakobson, flying beside me. They will leave white lines carved into the air to reach the mainland, where help will be sent.
What is being done here that cannot be done in any other medium?
A first answer might be personal participation. A video game has to be pushed forward by its player; it will not play itself. This is not true to anywhere near the same extent with movies or television, where one merely has to keep the eyes open and pay attention. But something like it is the case with reading a novel or a poem: the reader must engage it to the extent of opening it, turning the pages, moving eyes over text, and reflecting on the meaning, or it too will go nowhere.
What is different, then, between progressing in the narrative in a video game and doing the same with a book? It is the possibility – or rather, the absolute inevitability – of choice between alternatives that can reshape the narrative, the "text," that is unique to the game form.
The reader of a book may be doing any number of book-related things in the process of reading, but the text will be the same in every case. Differences in understanding will be because of differences in the reader – time period, nationality, gender, social class, and so on – not because the words of the text have changed. The text itself, the "true" text, never varies. Indeed, if the text is renowned enough, it will have acquired a pack of academic watch-dogs, who patrol around it ceaselessly, dividing their time between snarling at each other over minute variants and uniting to savage any outsider impudent enough to intrude.
In a game, this is not entirely the case. Even with very simple structures such as that of Dear Esther, where there are no scenes of "action" with unpredictable outcomes, the player must choose his or her own path, what to examine and what to neglect, and the pattern of choices made, the narrative of the "game" as a whole, will never be the same twice. In Dear Esther, this pattern is formed from scraps of information that the software picks at random from a number of possibilities for the area the player passes through. Some of these areas are side trips, optional; fail to traverse them, or do it in a different order, and the narrative will differ. You always begin at the dock in late afternoon, and end under the light of the full moon at the foot of the tower, but the experience between these two points will vary, at least in part because of your conscious choices. In other words, to play at all, you are compelled to construct your own unique narrative before you can even begin to interpret it.
Sounds wonderful. What could possibly go wrong?
Many things, of course. But on the creative side, one glaring weakness follows this strength like a shadow: quality control. Every potential narrative has to make at least some kind of sense. In Dear Esther, this is manageable, but when you're dealing with tens or hundreds of thousands of possible interactions, it can be....challenging. And since this is not real life but computer code, if anything is going to make sense, it's going to make sense because you designed it to. In other words, the multiplicity of narrative paths has vastly multiplied the load on the creators -- they are no longer writing a novel, but an encyclopedia. They are also guaranteed that their eventual customers, the players, will discover some screaming absurdity in the tens or hundreds of thousands of narrative paths the game provides.
Let's give an example.
There is one point in the Dark Brotherhood quest line in Skyrim where your mission is to poison the Emperor, but you end up killing one of his doubles instead. Naturally, even though it isn't the real Emperor, his guard detail is not pleased. If you manage to evade them and get down to street level in Solitude, the city where this takes place, and then surrender to one of the city guard, you will be fined 1000 gold pieces, the standard wereguild for the killing of some Joe Nobody and a relatively trivial sum in game terms, and sent merrily on your way, no hard feelings. Whoops! Someone has forgotten to insert a "Don't accept blood money for the murder of the Emperor's double" clause in the game's code. You never realize how complicated reality is until you try to create a credible simulation of it.
On the other hand, the lack of strict authorial control over the protagonist in a video game can be one of its greatest strengths. In a well-designed game, you're never quite sure what is going to happen next. In this respect, it is a little bit like a piece of public art that can be approached from different angles and traversed in any number of ways, giving different impressions to different viewers. Add to this the ability to vary the type and number of narratives available in the future according to the actions taken in the past, and you have something like a novel that begins to rewrite itself every time it notices you rereading a passage or skipping a word. Powerful, but not easy to author, or to check for errors. You will have to write far more "story" than any one player will ever be able to read.
Those readers who are trained in the analysis of narrative have probably noticed by now that I am a strict amateur in this field. I can only hope that none of you have done yourself a mischief or terrified your cat with hysterical glee. Be that as it may, I'm going to extend the discussion with a couple of terms that I pulled out of my ass while writing this: implicit narrative and embedded narrative. If there are proper terms of art that cover these two ideas, I hope someone can inform me of them.
What I mean by "implicit narrative" is an arrangement of things and sensations that will tell a story if you examine it carefully. In this sense, there are implicit narratives all over art and life, since we are used to looking for the implications of what we encounter. For example, if we are in a part of town where the shop windows are heavily barred and the doors are reinforced by metal plates, we read this as saying that the people there felt they were under enough threat that they were willing to put up with both the cost and the unfriendliness / ugliness of fortifying themselves this way. Something bad must have happened, or been feared, and it has elicited this response. If the bars and lock are somewhat dilapidated and/or compromised, we might further deduce that the situation in the neighbourhood has improved over time and the residents are no longer as nervous as they used to be. And so on and so forth. Any form of art can represent this. However, a novel or a poem would have difficulty providing all the details without at the same time focusing on some of them and neglecting other things. Photography, and better still, film or TV, can provide the details in a more natural way, reproducing what the eye can capture without necessarily dragging it to center stage. However, the "eye" in "what the eye can capture" will still be that of someone else. The viewer will be a passenger on someone else's trip. The advantage of a video game is that it's your trip, not someone else's. It's your mind that sends you to examine the sign in the alley and ignore the poster on the building on the other side of the street. As a result, your game-related knowledge will be extended in ways that would be closed to you if you had not made that particular choice and taken the initiative at the start. You will have further personalized your narrative, and if you traverse the same area again in another game, and make different choices, you will have a different experience.
An example might help. Fallout 3 is a first-person shooter / action role-playing hybrid set in the area around Washington, D.C. about two centuries following a nuclear war with China over the last reserves of fossil fuel. It is part of an alternate history for the United States in which society got stuck in an endless 1950s, the transistor was never invented, but artificial intelligence was nevertheless more highly developed than it is today and nuclear power was used much more widely. (In this and other aspects, Fallout 3 "science" is that of SF books and movies from the 1940s and 1950s, the world of atomic-powered cars and Robbie the Robot.)
At one point in the game, you are sent to the ruins of Germanstown Police Station to liberate a couple of people who have been kidnapped. While engaged in this, you may notice an encampment outside the building where there is a crude green-on-black text computer that still somehow operates (as with many things in Fallout 3, it looks like fifty years at most from the time of the nuclear war, not two hundred). If you turn it on, you find and can read the diary of a civil defense team leader, written as the members of her group and the people they are trying to care for slowly die of radiation poisoning. Below is the final entry:
Is this information necessary to play the game? No, not strictly. But it does make it more immersive, a place with a grim past to match its grim present. The same function can be served by books. There are over 800 written documents of various kinds in
Skyrim, for instance, from recipes to ransom notes, many of which serve only to establish atmosphere or teach the player game lore or history.
What I have called embedded narratives are omnipresent in life, but very difficult to handle in any type of storytelling other than a video game. An embedded narrative is present when engaging with something or someone in the scene uncovers a new narrative, an instant extension to the plot. It differs from an implicit narrative in that the viewer does not simply examine it and draw conclusions. He or she has to involve themselves with it in some way, make a voluntary decision to move forward, before the new information or new possibilities become apparent. A crude embedded narrative structure is found in the mystery or horror stories that used to be quite common, where you had to make an A/B decision at some point which took you to differing parts of the continuing story. ("If you said 'no,' turn to page 124. If you said 'yes,' turn to page 87.") However, this might better be called a binary structure, since you are offered only two alternatives and there is no going back. In an open-world or sandbox style video game, the player can often explore both A and B, or go half-way along B and decide it's not the right way, backtrack, and take A. And there can be a C, D, E, F, and G to choose from in addition to A and B. But it will be the player who chooses, once more putting his or her particular stamp on his or her understanding of the overall story.
As an example, let's consider a few of the first set of choices and possibilities presented to the player when he or she is chased out of Vault 101 and sets out into the Capital Wasteland in Fallout 3. Vault 101, a sealed, self-sufficient fallout shelter that has been your home for your whole life (the game starts, literally, with your birth) is the tutorial level, where you learn and practice the basics of interacting with other characters and the environment under relatively safe conditions. The tutorial ends with your father, your only living relative (your mother having died in childbirth), suddenly disappearing into the Capital Wasteland. This makes you persona no grata as well, so you have to escape the suddenly very hostile Vault and set out looking for Dad to find out what the hell is going on. Easier said that done, because you have never been outside Vault 101 in your entire life, and you have very little idea what is out there, other than the knowledge that whatever it is, it got thoroughly nuked two centuries ago and is probably still in rough shape. You also have very little equipment, usually only a pistol with a few rounds of ammunition, a baseball bat or other melee weapon, a few medical supplies, and some poor-quality armour taken from whatever hostile security guard(s) you've been able to shoot/beat to death on your way out.
The narrative has already begun to branch. Vault 101 is headed by an Overseer, who is leading the lynch mob after your hide. While escaping, you have the choice of killing this gentleman or evading him, and this choice will influence how the action will play out if you come back later on an optional side-quest. You're not told this at the time, though; you find it out later, if you choose to pursue the side-quest. If you don't, it has no further significance.
You leave the vault and walk out onto a level area that has a little sign: "Scenic Overlook." Like most apocalypse games,
Fallout 3 tends to lay the irony on with a trowel – one of the staples of the local radio station is the Ink Spots singing "I don't want to set the world on fire." After you adjust to the light – which takes a while, since this is the first time in your life you have ever seen the sun – you gradually bring a desolate scene into focus, ruins, smashed cars, and broken asphalt at your feet – the former town of Springfield, and more of the same all the way out to the horizon, where an obviously damaged Washington Monument can be seen. Just about everything you can see is demolished, damaged or gutted, and nothing but yourself seems to be alive. Go a bit further, and your radio will come to life with a variety of signals, usually five.
Four of these point you toward campaigns that were originally separately purchased extensions to the game, and another is one of the targets for the main quest. It's not very wise to chase after any them immediately – you're too weak – but once you've built up your character, they will be continually available alternative paths, large enough to qualify as games in themselves. Several of them can also be re-visited after your first trip there, meaning that they can appear in your narrative in several different places, and equipment you pick up in them can be used elsewhere.
The game suggests that you head for the nearby settlement of Megaton to ask about Dad. However, you have about 300 degrees of choice in your way forward (the hill directly behind you is too steep to climb). If you go hard left around the hill behind you, you'll hit a bandit camp on a highway overpass. There's rather a lot of them to take on for a beginning character, but it can be done, especially if you swiped a lot of medical supplies on your way out of the Vault. Victory will get you an assortment of junk to sell, ammunition, and possibly some new and more powerful weapons. Go straight ahead and a bit to the left, and you'll arrive at Springfield High School, which is infested with bandits and full of loot. If you want the loot, you have to fight the bandits (or sneak in and steal it); your choice. Go nearly directly to the left, and you'll skirt the upper edge of Springfield, past an intact house. If you go inside, you'll find a woman who identifies herself as a former prostitute working for the scumbag bar owner in Megaton. She took off, and in revenge, he's accused her of stealing from him. You can rob her yourself, or even kill her; you can offer to lie to the bar owner and tell him she's left the area if she pays you off; or you can say you'll lie to him for free (which is what I did below). What you choose to do, if you go into the house – there's no compulsion to do so – may have further consequences in the future.
There are many other things you can do. Some of them, such as proceeding forward and to the right until you reach a wrecked supermarket, will almost certainly get you killed at a beginner's level, but a good player might possibly get away with them, and they pay well. If you enter Megaton, a small walled settlement built around an unexploded nuclear weapon (don't ask why) and visit the general store, the owner, Moira Brown, will try to recruit you to do research for her new book, the
Wilderness Survival Guide. Naturally, that means getting yourself into all sorts of trouble so that you can become an authority on how to survive it. She's positively giddy with happiness when you come back irradiated till you glow in the dark so that she can test her new anti-radiation medicine:
There are nine separate quests in Moira's research schedule, which will take you all over the map and leave you with an impressive amount of equipment, information, and leads to new quests, always provided that you survive.
And meanwhile, the sheriff is friendly to any effort by you to defuse that nuke sitting in the middle of the town; it's live but dormant, and he's afraid it will wake up some inconvenient morning. On the other hand, in the saloon, there is a well-dressed man who will pay you a hefty sum of money to set the thing off deliberately....
But that's enough to make the point. Once you toss embedded narratives into the mix, the number of ways the game can be played is all but infinite. Your choices, and the forces set in motion by those choices, will never be configured the same way twice. What seem like minor divergences will sometimes lead in entirely new directions. If you are the kind of gamer who likes to dig around and flip over every rock to see what's under it, you'll find more than enough to keep you busy for years. But if you're one who likes to aim like a laser at the end of the main quest, the game will seem short and boring. Of course it will be. You'll have bypassed 95% of the content.
The problem is that an all but infinite set of possibilities entails an all but infinite amount of work to create and coordinate all of them at the same high quality. Here we come back to the initial question: would it be possible to write a game of this type, open world or sandbox, that no matter how it was played would be consistently at the artistic level of a major novel? Not very likely, I am afraid. Their strength, the ability to go in multiple directions at the same time, is at the same time their weakness. Multiplying interactions almost infinitely is too good a way to bite off more than you can chew.